


This Pendulum

by RurouniHime



Series: Urban Architecture [6]
Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Feels, Architects, Childhood Sweethearts, Closure, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Baggage, Ex Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Graysexual Newt, Internal Conflict, M/M, Memories, Missing Scene, New York City, Pining, Post-Break Up, Questionable Choices, urban planning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:21:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22301002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: When his ex is stranded by a snowstorm, Thomas offers up his couch for the night.
Relationships: Newt/Thomas (Maze Runner)
Series: Urban Architecture [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1027326
Comments: 12
Kudos: 87





	This Pendulum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coffeejunkii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeejunkii/gifts).



> As requested by the fabulous coffeejunkii: the missing scene from chapter 7 of Seems to Be Our Only Way (i.e., the night Newt gets stranded at the airport and stays over at Thomas's apartment in NYC). It will help to have read that full fic before reading this.

_Who wrote the book on goodbye?_

He meant to be angry. He’s _been_ angry, for nearly eight months, to a degree that frankly scared him at times. And it really is an imposition; it’s a freaking blizzard outside, no one should be driving in this, except Thomas is the one who offered, and Newt, his oldest friend in the universe, needs help, _whatever,_ he’s doing it, he’s already in the damn car.

The car that is a freaking icicle. It’s not even his car, and if Human Resources knew he was driving it to the airport tonight, after the conference is already done—well, he’ll just refill the gas tank and not draw attention to the odometer, and no one will be the wiser. He slaps the steering wheel to get some feeling back into his fingers, cranks up the heat, and blows into the cup of his palms at stoplights. The hell was he thinking, coming all the way out to New York? “‘You don’t know what cold is,’” he snarks in a voice that is really not like his mother’s at all and peers out at the signal light through the dusting snow. Getting heavier. Another couple hours and the airport will be unreachable.

Yeah, well, his mom was right.

But here’s Newt, waiting at the airport all night by himself, and a part of Thomas has woken up from its half-year coma and clenched. He can’t leave him there. He just can’t, not when he has an empty couch and a heater that clanks half the night because it’s actually working. It all boils down to that.

Except maybe it’s more than that.

_You sound like you just need some closure._

Ben had said it, slouched on the very couch Thomas is about to bring Newt home to. Ben, tipsy like Thomas, rolling his head back and forth along the backrest. That night, the first truly fun night since he’d arrived in the Big Apple, Thomas had been in no mood, and the mood he’d been in... apparently not happening, despite his albeit mediocre efforts. He’d wanted sex. He hadn’t gotten it. Annoying. 

_I don’t want closure,_ he’d said to Ben, and the truth came welling right up on its heels: _I want him back._

It had been oddly freeing to give in and say it.

 _I’m getting that. I knew a guy once…_ Ben shook himself, sat up a little. _But it’s okay, you know? If you’re not ready, you’re not ready._

Thomas remembers that frustration. He’d been ready, damn it, ready to wash Newton Isaacs out of his system in the messiest way possible, anyone would do, because if Newt wanted to let him go off to the other side of the country for his ‘dream job’ or whatever, if Newt couldn’t be bothered to fight for _them,_ then Thomas wouldn’t be bothered to keep his fucking torch lit, thank you. 

But then gorgeous, kind, uncomplicated Ben’d had to go be reasonable on him. _Yeah, but…_ is _this your dream job?_

 _No,_ Thomas had snapped, to be petulant. There was no sense asking himself that when he still resented everything.

 _I think you worked your ass off to get here,_ Ben said, eyeing him. _And if you did, then he—_

 _Shhh._ Thomas remembers his hangover starting early that night.

Well, now he’s not angry at everything. He really tried to be, but the second he saw Newt sitting there in the back row of Conference Hall C like he was trying to disappear into his chair, it was all white noise and static, the rest of the room winking out for a strange moment, and Thomas’s heart thudding-thudding-thudding in his ears.

“God,” he groans, stopping carefully at another light so he doesn’t fishtail and slumping face first into the steering wheel. “This is not a good idea. This is _not_ a good idea.” He doesn’t actually believe that—how can it be a bad idea to give Newt somewhere comfortable to sleep?—but it feels good to say.

What if he really does get angry, though, once Newt’s already in his home for the night? What if they fight and they can’t escape each other, and Newt runs out into the storm and Thomas is guilty for the rest of his life because a blizzard ate his first and only boyfriend to date, and it consumes him utterly and he ends up broken and lonely and—and totally blowing this whole thing out of proportion. 

For god’s sake, he thinks, and rolls his eyes. He’s an adult. Newt is an adult. They survived the conference, didn’t they? And they were face to face there.

“I can do this.” He turns into the terminal, wheels hitching on the frosty road, and throws a hand up at the asshole who jerks his 4Runner out in front of him from the American Airlines pick-up. “Yeah, get lost in a snowdrift, asshole. Okay. Okay, be cool.” Because there he is, in a thick brown coat with matching gloves and a red scarf that strikes hard against the eyes, taller than he was back in California, a messenger bag across his chest. 

Thomas hauls in a breath. “Be cool, be cool, be cool. Okay.”

He pulls to a stop, leans over, and opens the door, letting in a rush of freezing air, and all he sees at that moment is where the coat closes across Newt’s chest and waist, large, flat buttons, and then the canvas messenger bag is coming off and Newt is sliding into the passenger seat, and the door shuts them both inside.

Thomas swallows, fiddles with the gear shift. Listens to Newt buckle his seatbelt, and times his dart back into the river of cars. Newt’s wasn’t the only flight that got canceled.

“Thank you,” Newt says quietly, once the overhead light has dimmed into darkness again. 

Jeez, his _voice._ “Nah,” Thomas says. “Of course I’d come get you.”

He doesn’t look. But he can imagine the surprise on Newt’s face. He can imagine a lot about Newt, in perfect detail.

Except probably not, right? Newt’s taller, shit, his head is nearly brushing the ceiling and his knees are splayed wide to keep from touching the glove box; his hair is longer, swept in feathery waves across his forehead, and the ends cradle his brow and curl away from his nape where his coat collar rests. Thomas has never seen this coat before, or those shoes, the gloves Newt is removing with quick tugs at the fingertips, but the messenger bag is tan and beaten and familiar as hell, with the frayed strap Thomas remembers sliding between his fingers, the smell of pencil shavings and the coffee Newt spilled inside it once when his travel mug came apart.

“No suitcase?” It comes out threadier than he likes.

Newt shifts in his seat. “Uh, no, they already checked it through. I mean, they offered to get it, but.” His long fingers squeeze around the messenger bag. Thomas’ eyes snag. “It seemed a hassle to go back through it all over again and I have a change of clothes in here, so…”

“Yeah.” Thomas pulls out onto the service road heading away from the airport. “Smart. To pack something in your—” He gestures.

“Never know when you’re about to lose your luggage.”

Thomas snorts. “Apparently.” And Newt lets out a pleased huff of his own.

Is it really this easy? To fall back into old patterns? It’s tugging at him, to open his mouth and just keep on keeping on the way they used to until one of them finally ran out of shit to say about nothing and straight up changed the subject. No, he can’t afford to do that. He’ll drive, concentrate on that, and take the streets carefully and just take this one step at a time, except—

Okay, so. He’s obviously having some sort of Pavlovian response here. It happened at the conference; it’s happening now.

Newt smells like... Well, like Newt, and also airport and exhaustion and snow. His shoulder, his whole left side, is so close, but Thomas doesn’t need it to recall the scent of the cologne on Newt’s neck when he’d hugged him this afternoon, and then it had just seemed like this quiet and precious souvenir, unexpected, something Thomas could take with him. But now it’s all of Newt at once, in Thomas’s borrowed car, and it’s too much. Everything, _everything_ is spiking again, all the nerves that had gone dead on him months ago. He’d barely even noticed the numbness amidst the general misery, but now they’re flaring to life, sweeping over his flesh like a forest fire, as though Newt has reached over and manually switched them on. Thomas shivers, rolls his shoulders to hide it, and cranks the heat up another notch to hide that he’s hiding it. “Uh, it’s not far. Maybe an hour?”

Newt turns to look at him. “Not far?”

“For New York City in the snow?”

“Is this… safe?” Newt gestures at the new-flurried snow. “To drive in?”

“Oh, yeah. They’d close the roads. And they’ve salted once already. I have alerts set up, you know, in case RT closes. Buses are still running, look. Taxis.”

Newt settles back, and Thomas drives.

**

The buildings are all lit up; Newt does a lot of staring out the window, craning to see. Not that Thomas is looking. Thomas is _driving._ He is a very focused, very mindful operator of a moving death machine, in the middle of a honking stream of moving death machines with far less focused and mindful operators. Well, he assumes. Some of them are acting like fucking idiots.

“Come _on,”_ he mutters, easing onto the brakes for the fifth time. The person ahead of him certainly isn’t easing. More like slamming. And skidding the backend of the Buick they’re driving a little more each time. “I have to switch lanes. Yeah. I have to switch lanes, I am not dying on freaking Broadway just because you don’t know how to—”

Newt’s asleep.

Thomas swallows. Newt’s head is lolling, dipping to the right. His hands have gone lax across his thighs, his mouth barely open, breaths sucking softly in and out. His hair has tumbled along his forehead, and Thomas’s hand is halfway up to brush it back before he remembers that he doesn’t have the right anymore.

He should be used to this sting by now. Except this time, the anger isn’t there to hide it, and Newt’s actually here in front of him, not just a wry-smiling photograph on a Facebook feed—a photo that someone else took because that’s the shirt Newt bought right before Thomas left Oakland and Thomas sure as hell didn’t take that picture, he’d have remembered. That shirt is bright blue and beautiful, makes Newt’s eyes look like burnt earth, arrows down his torso straight into sharp black pants—no, Newt’s breathing and sleeping _right in this car,_ and Thomas forgets about the lights and the traffic and the twenty minutes until home, and just looks.

Newt has shadows under his eyes. Lines around his mouth that Thomas doesn’t remember. There’s a stiffness to his jaw that definitely wasn’t there before, that should have relaxed in sleep, but it hasn’t, it’s rigid and uneasy, and Thomas itches to smooth it away. Find out what in particular caused it. It reminds him of the way his head hurts when he wakes up in the mornings, alone in his apartment with the light that has been flattened between skyscrapers, and how he has to stretch a lot more than he used to in order to get the kinks out of his back, and he knows damn well why _he’s_ been so tense these last few months, but somehow he’s afraid to assume that about Newt.

He used to watch Newt sleep in their dim bedrooms. On his mom’s couch in the afternoons with the TV droning in the background; in the back of his car after a day by the river; on the grass by the soccer field while kids played on the structure across the park, and Newt’s knee had bent up, then sagged slowly to rest against Thomas’s side as he dozed. Watching now, Thomas’s stomach gives a fearsome twist, peeling the months away, plunging him back as though he’d never left. 

Someone honks. Newt jerks, huffing out half a sound, half a breath, and Thomas yanks his eyes back to the road, becomes the conscientious driver again. A minute later, Newt is hitching up in his seat, rubbing at one eye with his middle and ring finger—and okay, Thomas, enough, un-focus just a little bit, how about?—and blinking out the windshield. “I—Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Nearly there.” He wants to ask. God, he wants to ask. But that’s stupid. Of course Newt’s tired. It’s almost midnight after two days of a business conference on Eastern time.

Still.

**

“It’s, uh… It’s kind of a closet,” Thomas says, half turning in the front hallway because that’s all anyone can manage while holding a coat, much less a computer bag, but Newt just looks around once and says,

“Big for New York.” His cheeks flush, or maybe it’s just the light. “Or so I hear.”

Thomas gets into the main room, sets Newt’s bag down, and thumbs behind him toward the kitchen. “You want hot chocolate?” 

“Yes.” The hunch falls out of Newt’s shoulders. His eyes go bright. “Please.”

Thomas heats the milk, stirs in the cocoa, mindlessly tops up a mug with whipped cream and two perched marshmallows before he realizes he just made Newt’s exact preference. He freezes there in his cubby of a kitchen and sneaks a glance over his shoulder. But Newt’s face is angled away, studying the flimsy stand Thomas has rigged up for his TV. Despite the cramped room, he looks small and alone, curled into the armchair that came with the place. Elbows on his knees. His coat’s still on, the sleeves baring thin wrists and long-fingered hands that Thomas knows better than his own.

Thomas draws a slow breath and brings Newt his drink, heart thumping in his temples. Newt just takes it from him and pops a marshmallow immediately into his cheek. He’s smiling.

Thomas smiles, too.

“I’ll make up the couch for you.” Oh, so grateful he actually washed his sheets last weekend. He only has the two sets.

Doesn’t have all that many pillows, though. Thomas gives it three seconds’ thought, then heads into his bedroom and sacrifices one of his own to the cause.

“Oh, no, Thomas,” Newt starts as he comes out again, shaking the thick pillow into a fresh case. Thomas stops that flat.

“Come on. You deserve better than the floppy reject pillow.” He chucks said pillow at Newt’s head from where he’s had it squashed under his arm, and Newt catches it with both hands, lowering it into his lap. He gives it a squeeze and makes a face. Thomas snorts. “See?”

Newt shakes the limp pouch of cotton and feathers. “What happened to all the stuffing?”

“Interdimensional travel? I don’t really know.” He comes closer, takes the thing back, and frowns at it. “There aren’t any holes that I can find. Use this one instead.”

Newt nods but doesn’t look happy. “But what will you use?”

“Please.” For the first time all night, the smirk feels natural. “I kept the best pillow for myself.”

Half of Newt’s mouth quirks. “Cheers, Thomas.”

“Sure.” Should he—yeah. He makes up the couch, spreading the fitted sheet and tucking things in, layering the few extra blankets he has until it resembles a passable bed. Looks downright cozy, actually. Maybe he should sleep out here.

But that would put Newt in his bed.

It’s a borrowed bed, with a musty smell to the mattress when you take off the sheets, but it’s comfortable, restful, and part of that is due to the fact that it has never had Newt in it.

He shakes free. “Is this okay?”

“More than,” Newt says, gulping more cocoa. He looks like a startled bird. “Looks great.”

“Okay.” Thomas stands for a moment, hands on his hips, then sits down on the very corner, mussing the blankets he’s just laid out. He gets up again almost immediately in horror. “Sorry, you’re probably…” _He fell asleep in the car, you idiot._ “Definitely wiped out. I’ll, uh. Here.”

He gestures at the couch, but Newt makes no move toward it, nor toward his bag. He holds the mug carefully in his hands, looking down into its depths. The air tightens around them. 

“It’s good to see you,” Newt says, low.

“Yeah.” Thomas has to clear his throat to make it sound normal. “Good to see you, too. It’s been…”

“Just under eight months.” Which is exactly what Thomas was trying not to say, not to sound so sure about, but Newt, Newt sounds sure. It helps with the clog in Thomas’s throat.

“How are you liking it here?” Newt asks. His eyes dart back and forth over Thomas’s face. “Obviously you’re doing well. At work, I mean.”

He does like it here. And he does like his job, because despite his belligerence to Ben, it has proven itself to be his dream job, or at least the start of it. But parts of him are still sore, knocked into fresh bruising again by the presence of the person he most regrets leaving behind. “They like me,” he tries, and realizes that that’s exactly what Newt predicted they would do, back before it all turned into a private kind of hell. “I mean, I don’t annoy them too much yet.”

Newt laughs. The easier Newt gets, the looser Thomas feels, and this isn’t news, exactly, it’s just completely out of context nowadays.

“Has your mum been to visit?”

Newt’s wearing a thin gold chain, no charm that Thomas can see, but the chain perches on the edge of his collar bones, an almost perfect arc. Thomas tears his eyes away, trying to remember what Newt asked. “Uh, yeah. This last winter, actually. She was able to sell the car to—”

 _To Sonya._ Too late: the blanch of Newt’s cheeks gives it away, and Thomas curses himself. Of course Newt knows about the car, his sister is driving it these days. Thomas wonders what that looks like, if Sonya had to kick the seat further up to reach the pedals, if she knows what went on in that back seat. His chest hurts, fierce and tight, and he rubs it, looking away from Newt, from his blunder, from everything. Snow floats past the window where the drapes aren’t completely shut. He wishes he’d never opened his mouth.

“Anyway. She’s coming again this spring if I can get some time off.”

Newt nods, fast. His cheeks still haven’t regained their color. His cocoa is running low, just the froth of whipped cream and a half-melted marshmallow, and Thomas reaches for it. “Here, I’ll get you some more.”

The trip to the kitchen is absolutely crucial to keeping himself together, but once he’s refilled the mug and grabbed some crackers from the cupboard, he’s got things in hand again.

“Here.” Their fingers slide against each other as he passes the mug off, callus to knuckle. Thomas feels Newt’s thumb jump.

Newt looked down at the mug. “Thanks, Tommy.”

_Hey, Tommy?_

Just like that, Thomas’s heart trips again, as it had when he’d heard it over the phone. No one, but _no one_ called him Tommy. No one except Newt. When someone at work had tried, Thomas had flattened it mercilessly, furious at the way this near-stranger’s voice tried to overwrite the sound-memory in his brain. And then he’d just been furious at Newt again for making it still matter.

He clears his throat. He’s doing that a lot tonight. “Welcome.”

He damn near guzzles his own cocoa. It’s late. Later than late. His skin buzzes; he doesn’t think he’d be able to sleep now if he tried. He doesn’t know what to say. “How… How are you? With your…” He gestures, ashamed. He can’t even remember what Newt’s doing at The Last City. _Internship,_ Thomas had called it, but as a barb, an outlet for the frustration and the grief he couldn’t otherwise slough off. Newt had stayed for it, whatever it was, had walked away from them, and for that sin, Thomas couldn’t let it be worthwhile for even a second.

“I like it.” Newt looks down, then lifts his eyes again. “It’s fast-paced. I mean, I’m keeping up, but it’s… it’s rough. Sometimes.”

“They’re pretty demanding in this field, aren’t they?” Thomas sounds wistful even to himself. A part of him stretches helplessly after Newt’s voice, for any crumbs Newt will still give him.

Newt half sighs, half chuckles. He rubs a hand through his hair. Thomas watches it catch the light as it sweeps back over his brow. “Yeah. But it’s fascinating.”

 _More fascinating than me? Than us?_ The bite of that is long gone and only the burning coal remains, stoked brighter by Newt’s presence and refusing to go out. Thomas thinks, somewhat panicky, that now it might never gutter again. 

He just wants to know, so he can—can _know._ Whatever it is he was supposed to take from this, whatever lesson, whatever necessary evil he’s learning in exchange for his bond with Newt. He just wants to know the point already, because it’s getting harder and harder to look anywhere but at Newt’s downturned mouth, Newt’s thin fingers, Newt’s lowered eyes.

 _Just wrap this up._ Yeah. That’s a good idea, the best one he has. He opens his mouth, looks up at Newt yet again, and frowns, completely distracted.

“Oh, you, um. You have something. Whipped cream on your, here.” He reaches, thumb out, and stops dead, hovering between them. Newt stares at his hand. A tendon in his neck has drawn starkly into view. “Uh. Just, in the corner of your…”

“Here?” Newt wipes at his lip, but it’s the wrong side and kind of underneath. 

“No, it’s—the other side. Wait.” Instinct wins out: Thomas’s thumb touches down on warm skin, dragging cream across the seam of Newt’s lip. He swipes back, gets the rest.

Newt’s eyes are very wide. 

“Newt.” He means to apologize. Probably. He loses it somewhere in Newt’s blown pupils, in the barely-there movement of Newt’s lips as he breathes in. Thomas’s throat fills, so fast his own breath hitches. “Sorry.”

“What?” Newt sounds dazed. He shakes his head a little. He smells of snow, ice, wet wool and exhaustion, the barest hint of the same cologne he always wore, maybe the same bottle Thomas got him for his last birthday, and that gold chain, the one with the charm Thomas can’t see, catches the light again and again. Thomas’s heart jacks sideways; he inhales sharply, desperate for more.

This isn’t the Newt he was angry at. It isn’t. He can’t remember being angry anymore at all, it’s just _gone._ Whatever hurts he suffered at Newt’s hands, they feel like petty irritations. Not worth the cost they’ve been exacting from Thomas when compared to having Newt once again within arm’s reach. This person here in front of him is the best friend he ever had, the boy he never could get out of his head, his first kiss, first time, first everything, and he’s been without for over half a year, nerve endings severed all at once, and how did he ever do it? God, his body hurts with it, his throat burns and his chest aches. This is _his Newt,_ looking at him like he’s not seeing enough, like he’s looking and looking just to look. The last eight months feel more like a fog than ever, like he was never wholly there in the moment until, here and now, he is. He’s right on the edge, tipping over; if Newt does something—

And then Newt does. 

“Tommy?” he whispers, thin. His eyes flick down once.

 _Tommy._ Thomas moves, but it’s Newt whose fingers close around Thomas’s shirt, Newt who lurches forward with a reedy sound. His mouth is open when Thomas meets it, and Thomas licks in, desperate, out of air already, frantic to see if Newt—if Newt’s mouth is still—

It is. God, it _is,_ it’s— “Newt,” Thomas breathes against his lips—chocolate and cream, a hint of mint—frozen, _frozen_ and horrified and sorry, but he can’t pull away. “I—” 

Newt takes his face in both hands and drowns him in a kiss, slotting their mouths together and dragging him apart in great, heaving pieces.

The last barrier breaks: Thomas hauls Newt to him, wishing for a time machine, wishing for _time,_ for a bigger couch, for Pete’s sake, only Newt’s standing now, urging him up. Thomas’s hands are already pushing wool aside, scrabbling at Newt’s sweater. They lurch their way across the apartment, mouths meeting and jumping apart, the most awkward dance Thomas has ever done as he yanks his own sweater off, as Newt shrugs free of his coat with a final annoyed grunt. Thomas gets his hands in Newt’s hair, and it’s like they never left, like they’ve been buried there for eight long months, the dark backseat of his car, the yellow circle of lamplight on Newt’s bedroom rug, the tang of sunscreen licked from Newt’s lip onto his tongue—like no time at all has passed, except he’s shoved Newt up against the wall with his mother’s picture on it, the one from this last winter where they’re huddled, smiling, at the top of a frigid Empire State Building, the circles under his own eyes barely begun to fade, and he’s not looking at the picture but he knows it so well he sees it anyway, and Newt is taller and thinner than he remembers, and it hits him, his thumb tracing the painfully pronounced cut of Newt’s cheekbone, that he’s not the only one with reopened wounds.

“Newt,” breaks from him against Newt’s lips, and then Newt’s kissing him, all tongue and heat and devastating urgency, just like he used to.

They get to his room, his bed, even; he’s not sure how. All thoughts of danger, of the rashness of this, have vanished. It’s just Newt’s hands tugging his fly loose and pushing his jeans open, just Newt’s warm fingers slipping into place around his hips, just Newt’s thumbs hooking right back into the same hollows he used to hold. Pressing there. Leaving marks. Thomas wrestles the button-down shirt from Newt’s shoulders at last, thinks vaguely that he’d like to taste the arched column of Newt’s throat if he could just leave his mouth, for god’s sake. The _smell_ of Newt swamps him, sweet and spicy together, pole star, true north, home. Newt’s kisses are drugging, soporific and invigorating all at once. Thomas can’t remember them being this good. Eight months yawns between them, and maybe they weren’t this good. Then the gold chain is swinging free and at the end of it—

Like a washer, small and simple, smooth-sided, nothing Thomas recognizes. It rests against Newt’s skin, moving as he breathes. A gift, maybe. Thomas’s abysmal evening with Ben that first month in NYC rears in lurid technicolor, before Ben had managed to talk him down, and maybe Newt didn’t wait either but no one was there to stop _him,_ maybe Newt has been—has—

Newt’s hand moves around to his front and in, cupping him bare under his boxers, and Thomas gasps, a hiccup of air. He wraps his fingers in that chain and yanks, shoves forward into Newt’s grip. Thought stalls. He becomes aware that Newt is shaking.

The scramble goes mad, then, clothing and half words dropping away, and _skin,_ and Thomas comes to himself on his back, Newt’s pendant bumping cool on his chest, his t-shirt still snugged around one shoulder and Newt above him, pressed bodily between his legs, kissing him with long, gutting sweeps of his tongue. Thomas gives himself over, lets the rhythm, the familiar curl and thrust of their tongues, the same steady grind of their hips, become one and the same. His pelvis aches, sudden and fierce; he squirms, bites at Newt’s mouth, digs the fingers of one hand into Newt’s shoulder and the other into his ribs, feels the slip-slide of their sweat between them, wonders if he needs a condom—god, maybe he needs a condom, he’s never needed one before, _they_ never—but somehow can’t imagine it of Newt, that he would be with anyone else, and then he’s coming between their bellies with a broken moan, Newt’s teeth clamped into his lower lip, hips hitching out of control as it rolls through him, all the hurt washing outward in a flood of centerless bliss, and then every muscle in Newt’s back goes rigid under Thomas’s hands, and Newt comes too.

Thomas gasps into Newt’s neck, suddenly desperate for air. His ears ring. He’s overheated and hazy, drained beyond anything he can remember from the whole hellish time in this city. The ache, the hole around his heart, is missing. It leaves behind a bone-deep exhaustion, the kind he used to feel after a grueling race at high school track meets. Euphoria slithers up his spine, melts over him like liquid gold as Newt finds his mouth again—makes a sound against it that Thomas will never, ever forget, all weak and pained—and kisses him.

God, _Newt._

By the grace of god, Thomas stays silent. There are so many words. So much he wants to say, pushing at the back of his teeth to get out. Instead he rolls Newt over, presses Newt’s hands to the sheets either side of his head and—fingers clenched around beautiful, fragile wrists—gives in again. Trails his way down well-known skin, the odd freckle scattering Newt’s collarbone and above his nipple, tastes the thump of Newt’s pulse, sucks across heaving ribs and soft, shuddering belly, savors salt and musk and faded cologne spice—

( _Tommy, I missed you,_ Newt gasps, his voice absolutely shattered. _Missed you so much—_ and, preaching to the freaking choir, shit. Thomas digs his fingers into Newt’s flank, his thigh, can’t stop moving, winding a hand into Newt’s hair where it has always belonged. He’s so grateful he didn’t sleep with Ben, with anyone, because, god, Newt is steeped in his blood, latched into the walls of him, Newt never left. He’s not over Newt, his heart is a giant sore mess, and maybe this is a terrible idea but he just can’t make himself care. When he lets Newt go again, panting into his shoulder, Newt gasps unfinished words as he fists and releases Thomas’s fingers. Newt’s mouth is hot, as sultry as the flat heat of a New York August. His tongue flickers, restless around the next kiss. He breaks Thomas apart with one sharp roll of his hips, with teeth at his throat.)

—and remembers.

**

It’s snowing. Lying in the darkness, Thomas doesn’t know how he knows. There’s a permeating silence and a sinking chill. He wonders if, lying next to him, Newt is asleep. If Newt’s staring up like him, counting the faint stripes of light on the ceiling. If Newt hears the click-hum of the refrigerator, the distant water in the pipes of the apartment below, the rare swish-slush of a car on the street.

He wonders what Teresa’s doing in the apartment across the hall. If his mom’s still awake twenty-five hundred miles west in the lamplit kitchen with a steaming mug of tea. 

He wonders what time it is.

**

By the time Newt’s phone chirps, an insistent chiming from somewhere close to the door, Thomas’s eyes burn. He rubs them as Newt stirs next to him, and blinks. Feels the efficiency of Newt’s motions: too aware to be coming up out of sleep.

Thomas gets up without looking, finds his boxers and pulls them on. Despite the cranking heater, the room is freezing; he fumbles the bedside lamp on, wincing at the light, then goes to the closet, reaches up into darkness and pulls down a folded towel. He feels foggy, as though he’s been asleep, and he hasn’t. When he turns around again, Newt is standing in boxers and his undershirt, kneading his eyes.

“Here.” Thomas tosses the towel onto his side of the bed. “You can shower. If you want. It’s.” He gestures toward the hall. 

Newt picks up the towel. “Thanks.”

Thomas traverses his apartment like he’s never walked it before, unsteady feet and shaking knees. He shivers his way through breakfast, less cold than just out of control. He listens to the dull hiss of his shower, breathing too fast until he remembers to stop. Inhale. Hold it. His stomach feels crampy, and he knocks over the salt twice when he tries to grab it. 

He tries to think, and can’t.

He forces down what food he can and goes back to his room, where the tousled bed just stares at him. Newt’s clothes are no longer on the floor. The need to be clothed, to be _covered,_ nearly devours him. Thomas scrabbles together jeans, shirt, sweater, socks, opening and shutting drawers, and when Newt exits the bathroom in a huff of steam a few minutes later, all he has to do is point.

“Breakfast is. Uh, yeah.”

Newt, dressed in a wrinkled turtleneck and the same dark pants, nods. _Thomas_ nods. He shuts the door between them and turns on the shower again.

He strips back to nakedness, hisses under the hot water. Scrubs himself, too fast, just wanting to get out. Can’t remember if he washed his hair and does it again.

Can’t seem to _wake up._

**

Out in the cold of the apartment again, Thomas rubs his nose and locates his car keys, and does not watch Newt pull on his shoes. He clears his throat. “What time is your flight again?”

“Six-fifty-five,” Newt says.

“Okay.” Thomas gestures toward the door. It’s 4:40. They might make it. “Okay.”

Despite the snowfall during the night, the drive isn’t bad, although Thomas will be damned if he can remember any of the details. The city is somehow muted and full of light at the same time, and despite the buildings passing outside, the world feels only as big as the enclosed bubble of the car. Newt doesn’t say a word. Neither does Thomas, though he can hear Newt breathing, smell Newt in his nostrils. He may as well have not showered for how much it feels like Newt’s still on him. Traffic is just complicated enough to make their silence explicable, and Thomas doesn’t try to change it.

 _What are you doing, what did you do, what are you doing, what did you do?_ It curls on repeat through Thomas’ head, each time dripping a little more mortification into his gut, but it doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t know the answer, to either question. He grips the wheel, digs his thumb into the leather, and keeps on driving.

**

At Newt’s terminal, Thomas gets out of the car. Newt opens the door, starts to climb out, and Thomas can’t stay in there anymore. He stands in the vee of his door and the car frame, watching as Newt pulls his bag over his shoulder, as Newt gets ready to leave.

He licks his lips and tastes Newt there. It doesn’t bring relief. 

Newt shuts the passenger door and backs up. Thomas stays where he is. He keeps his hands in his pockets. He swallows again and again around the ball stuck in his throat, and is glad of his high coat collar. Wonders if he has hickeys, and how he’ll feel when he looks at them in the mirror.

“Thank you for letting me stay,” Newt says, and then, “Thomas.”

For letting him stay? It’s painfully funny. What about for… for—Thomas squashes what all else they did down and nods. Newt’s leaving. He’s not staying and he never was, and Thomas isn’t going back and he shouldn’t have done what he did. His stomachache is turning sick and hollow, reality dripping into it and solidifying further with every second. “Yeah. Take care, Newt.”

Newt nods at him. His eyes hover, and then he turns and walks into the airport. Thomas watches him until he’s out of sight through the doors.

**

He drives home, clutching the wheel with trembling hands. The sky is getting lighter, the snow barely a flurry anymore. The ball in his throat has expanded into an itchy knot, and swallowing only makes it worse. He gives up trying to control his breathing, lets the sound of it fill the car, blinks and rubs at his eyes over and over again. He goes lightheaded at one point, realizes he’s panicking and that no one’s here to stop him. He makes himself breathe, stays competent by the skin of his teeth. Finally, finally, he pulls the car into the garage beneath his building, parks it, and gets out. His legs shake as much as the rest of him; he makes it to the elevator and then he paces the tiny cubicle as it clanks upward, taking forever, and right before he gets to his floor, he realizes that the very last thing he wants to do is go back into his apartment.

He does anyway. It’s dark. It smells like slightly burnt eggs and steam from the shower. But it doesn’t smell like Newt, not in the living room. He flicks on the bathroom fan he forgot about, avoiding the bedroom entirely, and kicks his boots against the wall. Collapses on the couch and just… breathes.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Not exactly a happy ending. You have to go to Seems to Be Our Only Way and the rest of the series for that. But this scene was especially requested by my good friend coffeejunkii. I hope you enjoy it, my dear! *hearts hearts hearts*
> 
> Title and quote from Lauv's _The Other._


End file.
